Wizard of Oz

In the three years since he won an Oscar for his electrifying portrayal of a mentally unstable pianist in Shine, Geoffrey Rush has become a superstar - without losing his sanity or good sense. Stephen Moss meets the Australian whose bravura performance as the Marquis de Sade could bring him another Academy award

Geoffrey Rush spends the entire two and a bit hours of his new movie, Quills, locked in the cell of a lunatic asylum. This is perfect preparation for a day at the Dorchester, where he is incarcerated in an ornate room, given a constant supply of coffee by publicists, and asked to perform for the benefit of a group of cynical journalists. Luckily, Rush is so vivid that he survives both with aplomb: brilliant as the imprisoned Marquis de Sade (some critics have tipped him for a second Oscar), and in his hotel room appearing to offer up freshly-minted answers to questions he has probably already been asked six times that day.

Quills, which is directed by Philip Kaufman, tells the story of the final years of Sade, condemned to the asylum of Charenton and forbidden to write, but smuggling out his incendiary texts with the help of a laundry girl, played by Kate Winslet. It is a costume drama that eschews historical fidelity in the interest of questions of universal significance - good v evil, freedom v censorship, the double-edged sword of creativity - and a broader audience. Thus Winslet as an early 19th-century French laundress, Michael Caine as an authoritarian doctor, and Joaquin Phoenix as the well-meaning priest who runs Charenton - none of them remotely believable, but perhaps that isn't the point.

The critic Anthony Lane was suitably dismissive in the New Yorker, but spared Rush the executioner's blade. "If you can stomach this stuff," he wrote, "Quills should be seen simply for the presence of Geoffrey Rush. Of all the lies perpetrated by the film, his alone will win you over; in place of the Marquis de Sade, perhaps the most wearisome of revolutionary writers, we have a charming combination of scoundrel, flirt, dandy, nudist and wit."

When Rush is on screen, the movie comes alive; when he isn't, it feels laboured and ludicrous. It is like one of those flabby novels with one terrific character, where you find yourself skipping pages in the hunt for his next appearance. It is a bravura performance - locked in that one room, remember - from an actor who, in the three years since he won the best actor Oscar for Shine, has become a superstar without losing his sanity and good sense.

Rush is a valiant defender of the film, and obviously enjoyed working with the literary-minded Kaufman, director of The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. "You get offered something like this and you have to take the bait and rise to the occasion," says Rush, before launching into a fluent exposition of the historical background to the film.

"The period in which it is set is full of great extremes - a period in European history when the world was changing at an enormous rate, from an aristocratic, feudal structure into hopefully a democratic one. On one side of the coin, you have Rousseau saying man is a noble creature, give him the right nurturing and goodness will prevail. On the other, you have the marquis going, 'No, man is a nasty little depraved animal, take a look at yourself.'" Rush is, as you may have gathered, an actor who both reads and thinks.

"I tried not to judge the marquis too much," he says. "I was interested in the inner personality of the man as a writer, as a creative force who still has unavoidable connections and presence 200 years later. I wanted to assess the distance between the man and the writer, and the story takes you on that journey. He has a fear of intimacy and constructs a brilliant edifice around himself, but that is part of the sadistic personality and search for control. In playing him, I had to ask myself, 'Am I being too big, too crude? Am I using a machete when I should be using a scalpel?' But a machete can be pretty effective in the cinema."

Rush, who is 49, is tall, rangy and fluid: even sitting down, all his limbs seem to be moving simultaneously. He chainsmokes and wears the battered outfit he perfected in the 20 years he spent on the Australian stage before Shine brought him to the attention of Hollywood. He comes across as a human being, and there can be no greater compliment for an actor, especially one enjoying - albeit relatively late - a meteoric film career.

It is probably his stage work, past and present (he has no intention of letting it go), that has kept him sane. He has been attached to the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney since 1985, working principally with director Neil Armfield and achieving notable successes with Gogol, Chekhov, Jonson and Beaumarchais, exploring what Rush calls "the grubby corners of the classical repertoire".

Hollywood has latched on to him as a character actor who can play historical figures - Sir Francis Walsingham in Shekhar Kapur's brilliant Elizabeth, Philip Henslowe in the Oscar-garlanded Shakespeare in Love, and now Sade - but he doesn't want to abandon modernity and is happy to be wearing a three-piece suit in John Boorman's forthcoming film of John le Carré's The Tailor of Panama.

The latter was shot last spring, but after that Rush took a five-month break. "The last three years have been extraordinary," he says. "I wanted to assess that on a personal level and on an aesthetic level. I spent time at home in a meaningful way, rather than a constantly disrupted professional way." His solitary engagement in that period was to appear in a production of David Holman's The Small Poppies, a play he commissioned about a child's first day at school. Very un-Hollywood; very Geoffrey Rush.

Even Shine, in which he played the mentally unstable pianist David Helfgott, was a slow-burn triumph, giving him time to adapt to the transformation it would bring to his life. "I read the script in 1992, and knew as an actor that the story was great, very vivid and very direct. In a strange sort of way, it fitted into a broadening repertoire of characters that I was playing on stage. Even though it was about a pianist in Perth, I found a connection through having played Lear's Fool. The film got put on hold for lots of different reasons until 1995. It finally came out at Sundance and people responded very favourably, but then it didn't open for months and months."

Rush gives the impression that if the rollercoaster started by Shine careered off the track tomorrow, he wouldn't be the least bit bothered. "An actor's life is a series of three-month blocks with great question marks constantly over the future," he says matter-of-factly. "I don't really know what I'm doing after this. Things have been talked about, but nothing's set. People have this image that you must have scripts arriving by FedEx and beeping going on outside your door all the time. But it doesn't quite happen like that."

Clearly, however, quite a few FedEx packages are arriving at his Melbourne home, and he is careful about what he accepts: "There are some aesthetic guidelines at work, and there's also a sense of do-or-die daring. I keep thinking, 'Well, what do I have to lose?' It's always been the most interesting time in my theatrical life when I've deliberately not got into a rut with something. Instead of asking what my strong suit is and playing to that, you go, 'No, I'll try something totally different', just for your own amusement and your own sense of variation."

At the moment, that means not accepting every historical role, every reprise of Henslowe and Walsingham, that comes his way. "Choosing parts is based on a series of instincts and hunches," he says. "It's extremely random and haphazard." Neither his instincts nor his aesthetic guidelines kept him out of two panned movies in 1999 - Mystery Men and House on Haunted Hill - but he makes a case for having said yes to both.

"I had very high hopes for Mystery Men, just in the sheer eclecticism of the cast. It was a sample of the greatest comic minds in contemporary America, from Ben Stiller to Paul Reubens to Tom Waits. It was an unusual film because it had a level of irony and fantasy which, with an Australian sensibility, I understood really well: the idea of suburban backyard superheroes. But America was baffled by it, and maybe as a film it suffered by not trusting its own instincts enough. If it had been slightly more subversive, it might have worked better."

And House on Haunted Hill? "It was a time for genre-hopping, a time to have a taste of what my current fortune had given me, and I liked the idea of being in a horror film. It was jumping into a playpen that I was not at all familiar with. The director [William Malone] was a great aficionado of the horror genre - he got very excited one day, and told me that the guy doing the underwater stunts was the son of the guy that played the original Creature From the Black Lagoon. But again that film had a kind of commercial drive to it that satisfied what it set out to do. It was made for the Halloween weekend, blitzed that weekend, did all right the next weekend and then was gone. It made three times the amount of money it was made for." A limp defence, but we'll assume his intentions, and his attraction to the hammy role of Stephen Price, were pure.

One point Rush makes about all these films - the failures as well as the successes - is that they involved big casts or, as the thesp in him prefers to call them, large companies of people. He clearly enjoys the buzz of collective theatrical endeavour, which is why it wasn't just his angular Elizabethan face that made Henslowe the perfect role for him.

Rush, who grew up in Queensland, came from a resolutely non-theatrical background. His father was an accountant and his mother a shop assistant, but he fell in love with the footlights early. "I caught the tail end of vaudeville, travelling tent shows. The tent must have held 700-800 people, like a canvas version of the Palladium with a proscenium arch down one end. They would do a variety show at night and, in the day, the same company would do an Aussie version of the traditional English panto. I went when I was six and was hooked.

"I ran the school drama club at high school, where we always did grand three-acters like Charley's Aunt, The Admirable Crichton, and Arsenic and Old Lace. We liked plays that had canvas doors. Then I went to the University of Queensland at a time, in the late 60s, when the world was shifting at an enormous rate. It was a giddy time with police raiding our local record shop to confiscate copies of Hair."

He got a job with the newly-formed Queensland theatre company, where he spent three years, and in the mid-1970s studied for two years at the Lecoq school of mime, movement and theatre in Paris. "I could have gone to the national drama school in Sydney, but I felt I would be doing more of the same. I knew my preference and facility was for something a little European, something physical."

He must love the stage because he married an actress, Jane Menelaus, who plays Sade's estranged wife in Quills, and they appeared together in The Importance of Being Earnest while on their honeymoon in 1988. They have two children, aged seven and five. Rush says he manages to spend around 60% of his time at home in Australia, with the rest split between the UK and US.

He has never appeared in London's West End, but would like to give it a shot, though on his own terms and not as a visiting Hollywood celeb. "It would be a great challenge, but I feel more and more that I would like to extend a greeting from our side of the world and bring something over with the company I work with."

As for his film future, he realises that Hollywood can be a fickle master. "You look for precedents: people from a theatre background who were heroes before I got into film acting, like Gary Oldman, Daniel Day-Lewis and Alan Rickman. You look at their careers and think there's a period of good fortune, there's a period of excitement, and then a period of boredom and indifference to it because it's not giving you back what you put into it."

If that happens to him, Rush knows he has his old love to fall back on. "I've always been a lifer. I've always liked the idea from my very early days as a professional actor that I could do it for a living. When I was in my 20s, I worked with actors who were in their 70s. That's the washing line that I want to hang it out on."